in reply to helping along $_

Hmm, interesting. Not sure how useful that really is, but here are some ideas to extend it.
  1. useless use of constant in void context becomes assignment. So... 
    10;
#is equivalent to
$_=10;

    [download]
  2. Add support for some of the perl6 operators such as //=
  3. UPDATE: An example script using this, which is an interactive calculator. 
    > 22/7;
< 3.14285714285714
> *=9**2;
< 254.571428571429

    [download]

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

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Re^2: helping along $_
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 09, 2002 at 12:20 UTC
    Not sure I like this idea. Modules tend to end with 1; and 0 and 1 occasionally appear in void context in legit uses like 1 while s/foo/bar/; I would rather see the simple = usable this way as in =10; Though now that I think about it, this may be confusing to distinguish from POD directives.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      changing 1; to $_=1; in a module is not going to do anything significant, unless $_ is not scoped to the module and something else using the module expects $_ to be undefined initially. Your other example is not a useless use of constant in void context, I'm not sure it's even in void context, but I'll take your word for that. It's not useless because it's part of a larger, more meaningful statement, if the remainder of the line consisted of only numeric operations, numbers, (variables) and semi-colon, that would be useless use... and safe to muck with.

      --
      perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

[reply]
        Actually, 0 and 1 are special-cased in perl to not throw a warning. Consider: 
        $ perl -w -e'1;' -e'10;'
Useless use of a constant in void context at -e line 2

        [download]

        Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Cool Uses for Perl